1941

"Just a case of war nerves," ballooned into a New Hollywood demolition derby. Not quite a week after Pearl Harbor, the holy land of Hollywood comes to a Japanese navigator as a blonde's ass dangling from the submarine's erect periscope. From washing dishes to commanding tanks, one day in the life of the "tap-dancin' Yankee fry-boy" (Bobby Di Cicco), his Olive Oyl is the nervous USO volunteer (Dianne Kay) and his Bluto is the handsy Army corporal (Treat Williams). A centrifugal dance contest is but a step away from a brawl that spills into the streets, "maybe in the future we can have some Negroes come in and we'll stage a race riot." Steven Spielberg has many plates spinning in the air, his main goal is to outdo Scorsese's New York, New York as a cinephile's kaleidoscopic retro-shrine. (Edwards' The Great Race is another model, with silent slapstick replaced by Looney Tunes cartoons.) The comely secretary (Nancy Allen) has a fetish for cockpits so the amorous captain (Tim Matheson) flies her through a downtown blitzkrieg, coitus interruptus courtesy of the trigger-happy barnstormer (John Belushi). Warren Oates as the cracked colonel leans toward Dr. Strangelove, and there's Slim Pickens revising the who's-on-first routine with Toshiro Mifune, "banzai, my balls!" The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming in spirit, Dumbo in the eye of the storm for General Stilwell (Robert Stack) to weep over. Outside the theater, Dan Aykroyd waxes patriotic: "You think the Krauts believe in Walt Disney?" A cannonade of zaniness aimed at the audience, Spielberg's destructive side amply enabled by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale and John Milius, a vortex of sadistic bedazzlement. Off the cliff with suburbia and full steam ahead into the Eighties, "a long war" indeed. With Ned Beatty, Lorraine Gary, Christopher Lee, John Candy, Lionel Stander, Murray Hamilton, Eddie Deezen, Perry Lang, Wendie Jo Sperber, Frank McRae, Joe Flaherty, Elisha Cook Jr., Dub Taylor, and Samuel Fuller.